Tuesday, August 05, 2014

One month after the Tour's Grand Départ passed through Yorkshire, The Telegraph & Argus tries to make some balance:

Ann Dinsdale, of Brontë Parsonage Museum, said visitor numbers at the venue had been "up and down" in the month since Le Tour, adding that they had had very busy days among some quieter ones."Speaking as a Haworth resident it was fantastic and really good, " said Mrs Dinsdale. "In the future I think it will have a really positive effect." (Rhys Thomas)

Yorkshire is indeed a most valued tourist attraction as it has been chosen for the second year in a row as Best Destination in Europe in the World Travel Awards. The Malay Mail adds:

When the region captured the title last year, it was the first time in 17 years that a county rather than a city was given the award.While it’s been forever immortalised in English literature as a tertiary character in Emily Brontë’s 19th-century classic Wuthering Heights, today the region has carved out a reputation as being a gastronomic destination with six Michelin-starred restaurants in the county, more than any other region outside London.

What’s been described as an “abortion rom-com” has a lot in common with Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, and other Victorian novels that showcase how female friendship can develop the heroine’s positive qualities. (...)Although readers now often miss this, the Victorian heroines who make the happiest marriages usually also have a close female friend or strong female network. Jane Eyre, Esther Summerson in Bleak House, Amy in Little Dorrit, Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch: each forms close ties with at least one other woman that anticipate the happy marriage she ultimately contracts with a beloved man. By contrast, heroines without true female friends end up unhappily married or not married at all—think of Hardy’s Tess, Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights, or Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair. (...)Female friendship in Victorian novels often bolsters their female protagonists’ sense of self and helps them to question the ways that society limits women. In Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, for example, the bold title character befriends the shy Caroline Helstone and together they coin a feminist myth about the first woman that celebrates spontaneity, curiosity, and power—all qualities that their relatives and guardians object to in women. (Sharon Marcus)

My great grandmother died in childbirth. It’s likely some of you have grandmothers or great grandmothers who did, too; maternal death being common up through the end of the 1800s. Thankfully, maternal health care has advanced radically, and we don’t live in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights world, where all the mothers are either already dead or at risk from of pregnancy and birth.